Comparing Two Approaches to Remote Mailbox Access: IMAP vs. POP
by Terry Gray, Director, Networks & Distributed Computing at University of Washington There are several different approaches to building a distributed electronic mail infrastructure. For example: LAN-oriented, vendor specific systems; single time-sharing machine solutions; and Internet-oriented mailserver-based solutions. The principal options in this last category are DMSP (Distributed Mail System Protocol), POP (Post Office Protocol), and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). These protocols are more robust foundations for a distributed e-mail system than vendor-specific systems requiring gateways to Internet mail. Of these three, POP is the oldest and consequently the best known. DMSP is largely limited to a single application, PCMAIL, and is known primarily for its disconnected (offline) operation capabilities. IMAP offers significant advantages over POP. This gap is likely to widen as a result of the imminent addition of disconnected operation extensions to IMAP. With POP (Post Office Protocol), mail is delivered to a shared server, and a personal computer user periodically connects to the server and downloads all of the pending mail to the "client" machine. Thereafter, all mail processing is local to the client machine. Think of POP as providing a store-and-forward service, intended to move mail (on demand) from an intermediate server (drop point) to a single destination machine, usually a PC or Mac. Once delivered to the PC or Mac, the messages are typically deleted from the POP server. IMAP is a client-server mail protocol designed to permit manipulation of remote mailboxes as if they were local. With IMAP, mail is again delivered to a shared server, but the mail client machine does not normally copy it all at once and then delete it from the server. It's more of a client-server model, where the IMAP client can ask the server for headers, or the bodies of specified messages, or to search for messages meeting certain criteria. Messages in the mail repository can be marked as deleted and subsequently expunged, but they stay on the repository until the user takes such action. Depending on the IMAP client implementation and the mail architecture desired by a system manager, the user may save messages directly on the client machine, or save them on the server, or be given the choice of doing either. While POP and IMAP both allow access to mail on a remote server from a variety of different client platforms, they reflect two different paradigms and styles of use. POP works best for people who use a single client machine all the time; it is not well-suited for the goals of accessing one's inbox of recent messages or saved-message folders from different places and different machines at different times. The strength of POP, other than its wide availability, is that it minimizes use of server resources and connect time when used via dialup. However, since IMAP is a functional superset of POP, it can also be used in the "POP paradigm" of connecting to a mail server, retrieving all the pending messages, and disconnecting. Thus, the only advantage of the POP *protocol* over IMAP relates to software availability and not functionality. As the amount of IMAP software is growing rapidly, the historic prevalence of POP is of diminishing importance when compared to the many advantages of IMAP. Because IMAP can mimic all of the POP mail retrieval functions, it is useful to distinguish the characteristics of the IMAP and POP *paradigms*, as well as the protocols themselves. The paradigms define what the user can do in each model; the protocol characteristics relate to efficiency, performance, etc. Here are some of the key similarities and differences between the two... o POP and IMAP reflect two different paradigms: -POP = store-and-forward (usually to a single client). -IMAP = multiple client-server mailbox access. o Characteristics common to both POP and IMAP: -Mail is delivered to a shared, "always up" mail server. -New mail accessible from a variety of client platform types. -New mail accessible from anywhere in network. -Offline mail processing possible, though neither designed for it. -Protocols are open; defined by Internet RFCs. -Freely available implementations (including source) available. -Clients available for PCs, Macs, and Unix. -Commercial implementations available. -Internet oriented; no SMTP mail gateways required. o POP paradigm advantages: -Minimum use of connect time. -Minimum use of server resources. o POP protocol advantages: -Simpler protocol; easier to implement. -More client software currently available. o IMAP paradigm advantages: -Saved-message folders may be stored on server (as well as INBOX). -Allows access to INBOX (not just new mail) from multiple platforms. -Allows concurrent access to a shared mailbox from multiple platforms. -Allows concurrent access to mailboxes on multiple mailservers. -Offers improved offline mail handling. -Allows selective transfer of messages/parts to client (local Save). -Can also use POP paradigm, for minimum connect time and server resources. o IMAP protocol advantages: -Suitable for accessing non-e-mail data; e.g., NetNews, documents. -Faster startup time, as only the headers are fetched initially. -Allows selective fetching of individual MIME message body parts. -Effective over low-speed links. -Ability to use server for searching. -Offline processing w/resynchronizing is a planned enhancement. "Saved-message folders may be stored on server (as well as INBOX)" allows "dataless" clients and/or nomadic users (e.g. student labs). "Allows access to INBOX (not just new mail) from multiple platforms" means that if you have a Mac in your office, and PC at home, and a Unix machine in the lab, you can move freely among them and access the same INBOX. "Allows concurrent access to a shared mailbox from multiple platforms." This capability is useful when multiple individuals are processing messages coming into a common inbox. Changes in mailbox state can be presented to all concurrently active clients via IMAP. "Allows concurrent access to multiple inboxes on multiple mailservers." This is useful for people who have partitioned their incoming mail streams, either via delivery filters, or by having different accounts for different purposes. IMAP "offers improved offline mail handling" compared to POP. Unlike the DMSP protocol used in the PCMAIL program, neither POP nor IMAP was designed with offline use as a primary goal. However, POP is widely used for this, even though it is not particularly well- suited for the task. POP requires you to either entrust all of your mail to your client machine (which may be about to go thru an airport xray machine), or to over-ride the normal POP server behavior of deleting the mail on the server, and manually resynchronizing the diverging mailbox states at a later time. IMAP can do better: you can connect to the server, save to a local folder all or selected messages, and disconnect. The advantages over POP are that (1) the saved messages may be retained on the server, but *marked* as deleted, so they can be distinguished later from unselected or more recent messages, and expunged once it is clear they won't be needed, and (2) the ability to save (download) selectively --especially important when one has a 2MB audio message in the mailbox and is reading mail via a low-bandwidth connection from a machine that has no sound capability. "Allows selective transfer of messages/parts to client (local Save)." Especially when connecting to a mail server via low-bandwidth lines, it is useful to be able to defer transferring messages that are not of immediate interest until a more propitious time. Moreover, with multimedia or multipart MIME messages, transferring selected parts of a message in increasingly useful. Efficient processing of MIME messages is one of the major advantages of IMAP over POP. MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. It is a technique for encoding arbitrary files as attachments to SMTP and RFC-822 compatible Internet mail messages. This is something that proprietary, LAN-oriented, mail systems have had for some time, and now is finally available for the Internet. It allows one to send spreadsheets, word processing docs, images, and audio to 5 or 10 million of "your closest Internet friends". MIME has one particularly nice capability: it allows inclusion of alternate representations. For example, a plain-text version of a document, plus a fax or RTF version. With IMAP, the receiving mail user agent gets to decide which message parts to transfer and present to the user, falling back to plain text if that's all it can do. Even though MIME support is not yet pervasive, its importance and impact on the IMAP/POP question should not be underestimated. There is tremendous pent-up demand for this capability and it is taking off fast. In fact, people are already using MIME for things that have nothing to do with mail (e.g. encoding different representations of technical documents, for campus-wide information systems.) MIME is orthogonal to IMAP and POP, except that IMAP and MIME are extremely complementary, and there are already IMAP clients that understand MIME. (POP clients can and will be taught to understand MIME, too, but the fact that POP copies all pending messages at startup, and MIME messages can be very large, means that POP users may need to become even more patient!) "Can also use POP paradigm, for minimum connect time and server resources." The POP paradigm is of interest in situations where the only access to a mail server is via expensive dialup connections and multi-platform access to one's inbox(es) is not needed. It is also useful in environments where client machines are resource-rich and servers are resource-poor. However, because IMAP is a superset of POP functionality, IMAP can be used in "POP mode". That is, IMAP clients can be designed to provide the option of transfering all messages to the client and processing them locally (generally offline), thus providing the same advantages POP has in terms of minimizing connect time and use of server resources. In summary, the fact that IMAP provides access to a persistent remote mail store, and does not move all pending messages to the client machine, offers more flexible access to that mail, and provides significant performance advantages over POP in terms of start-up time and access to large MIME messages. The option of accessing remote saved-message folders and/or NetNews via IMAP (and from the same mail user agent) provides additional architectural flexibility in comparison to POP. A reasonable conclusion is that the only advantage of POP over IMAP is that there is currently more POP software available. However, this is changing rapidly, and IMAP's functional advantages over POP are nothing less than overwhelming.
